Abstract
Dharamsi considers Collingwood’s defence of the autonomy of the mental and contrasts it with the one articulated by liberal naturalists such as McDowell. Both Collingwood and McDowell, Dharamsi argues, acknowledge the irreducibly normative (in Collingwood’s words: criteriological) nature of the study of mind and both reject the widespread naturalist assumption that philosophy is continuous with natural science. The liberal naturalist’s and Collingwood’s strategy are however fundamentally different. McDowell’s strategy is to soften naturalism so as to accommodate within its womb the normative character of the mental, which a harder or more traditional form of naturalism struggles to provide a home for. Collingwood’s strategy agrees with McDowell’s diagnosis of the problem, but not with his proposed solution. For Collingwood, the solution lies not in liberalizing nature, but in rejecting a conception of metaphysics as a science of pure being and understanding it instead as a historical enquiry into the presuppositions of science, including natural science.
This chapter owes much to Stephen Leach’s and Giuseppina D’Oro’s thoughtful comments and recommendations.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Keenan in conversation and in an unpublished presentation that identifies both Collingwood’s claims that human nature is not specifiable once and for all combined with the procedural conception of persons as distinctively historical beings as central to the latter’s philosophy.
- 2.
We need not look further than Carl Hempel’s (1942) influential “The Function of General Laws in History” for a naturalized account of history.
- 3.
Aristotle (1933) considered Thales the founder of natural philosophy (Aristotle 1933: §983b20). While he did place deductive logic in the realm of mathematical reasoning, Thales is understood as being committed to a form of philosophical naturalism. Not entirely consistent with fully reductive views we associate with materialist ontologies today, Thales’ outlook demonstrates that ontological naturalism can be traced (at least) to the pre-Socratic philosophers. We might also look at Callicles’s excellent speech in Plato’s Gorgias (482e–484d). Callicles defines the just in terms of nature’s favouring the strong over the weak, famously arguing that this is demonstrated in nature as strong animals are superior to the weak (Schofield 2009). Not so much a defence of rational norms, Callicles defends instrumental instincts for survival where the powerful succeed and the weak are subjugated. Philip Kitcher (1992) argues in “The Naturalists Return” that naturalism was born in the nineteenth century and that everything before is pre-history (Kitcher 1992: 53; Rea 2002: 49). Kitcher traces contemporary analytic philosophy to Frege who has his philosophical progeny, including Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap (Kitcher 1992: 53). Kitcher’s locating of the development of contemporary philosophical naturalism is not without merit. It speaks, however, to a narrowing of the discipline’s historical record and the scope of its enterprise. Kitcher’s main claims are outside the scope of this chapter, but his sentiment captures an attitude that is not uncommon.
- 4.
Collingwood’s criticisms of psychology are well documented. David Boucher’s (1989) footnote in Collingwood’s Essays in Political Philosophy notes of Collingwood that he took over 50 sessions of psychoanalysis before believing himself qualified to comment on Freud (EPP: 81). Boucher also acknowledges Collingwood’s recognition of psychology’s usefulness; Collingwood is primarily critical of the field’s claim to be a science of mind (Ibid.).
- 5.
Collingwood’s discussion of the ‘overlap of classes’ in, An Essay on Philosophical Method , distinguishes between history and science (EPM: 26). There Collingwood claims that “history concerns itself with something individual, scientific thought with something universal” (Ibid: 26). He thinks that philosophy is closer to science since it concerns itself with universals … “and empirical science considers man as such, not, like history, this man distinct from that” (Ibid: 26).
- 6.
Sellars’s psychological nominalism, as he defends it in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” shapes McDowell’s own thinking. In §31 Sellars insists that children’s awareness of particulars, universals, facts, etc., depends on the acquisition of language (Sellars et al. 1997: §31).
- 7.
In his essay, ‘What Myth?’ McDowell (2007) argues that his position is related to Gadamer’s distinction between ‘being oriented towards the world’ and ‘merely inhabiting an environment’ (McDowell 2007: 346). McDowell thinks that there is a consistency here between Heidegger and Gadamer; he quotes the latter, “man’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature” (Gadamer 2013: 475–76; McDowell 2007: 346).
- 8.
D’Oro claims that Collingwood is an anti-naturalist in her Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (D’Oro 2002: 135). I agree with D’Oro that Collingwood is committed to transcendentals. She argues that “his commitment to transcendentals … is firmly grounded in his defense of metaphysics as the study of the fundamental principles that regulate domains of inquiry” (Ibid: 135). She premises her remarks on the following observations: 1. Collingwood is not an eliminativist nor is he a reductionist, 2. Collingwood is not Cartesian and is not an ontological dualist, and 3. Collingwood is not a property dualist or a non-reductive physicalist (Ibid: 135).
- 9.
D’Oro et al. (2018) in ‘Non-reductivism and the metaphilosophy of mind’ provide an account of Collingwood’s defence of the autonomy of the human sciences. They identify Collingwood’s commitment to explanatory pluralism, tracing its inspiration to Kant (D’Oro et al. 2018: 15). They show how explanations that appeal to norms are different in kind and not just in degree from those depending on “empirical regularities” (Ibid: 9).
- 10.
In his Principles of Art, Collingwood (1938) suggests in his discussion of a child’s cry, and the appreciable judgments underlying her distinguishing between her cries, the use of language but not of speech (PA: 236). This suggests to Collingwood that the child is enforcing her will on the world, in the absence of a plan or outcome. Collingwood uses the term ‘language’ to “signify any controlled and expressive bodily activity, no matter what part of the body is involved” (Ibid: 241). Suitability or “pre-eminence of one [expression] over the other” will depend on the normative utility of the expression’s development in a given historical and civilizational context (Ibid: 243–244).
- 11.
In §295 of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes: “In the case of self-conscious man the specific forms of consciousness constitute an ordered line of development, a necessary spiritual history. Organic nature has no such history: it falls straight from pure universality into the brute singularity of existence” (Hegel 1977: §295/535). This remark figures in Chapter V. of Phenomenology of Spirit “The Certainty and Truth of Reason”. Here Hegel distinguishes, in part, between reason and nature, providing, in a contemporary idiom, an epistemic distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual content for the observer of nature.
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Dharamsi, K. (2018). Oscillation and Emancipation: Collingwood on History and Human Nature. In: Dharamsi, K., D'Oro, G., Leach, S. (eds) Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02432-1_8
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